12. Smallish panel. Close-up of Judge Curtis’ boots. They are about eight inches above the ground and kicking wildly. Maybe we can see a hint of a tentacle, wrapped around his leg just below the knee…BOX: …HE DOESN’T MAKE IT!CURTIS: EEEEEYAARRRGHH…SOUND F.X.: SNAPP!!(Possibly the “SNAPP” could be arranged to fit across the scream, cutting it off sharply.)

[comics] Kevin O’Neill on the early days of 2000AD … ‘My memory of 2000AD in those days is just white paint, paste-up, altering stuff, copying and enlarging stuff and getting as good a lettering job as we could get, because sometimes that covered deficiencies. It was totally like a Frankenstein operation at times. If we ran out of time, we’d get Jack Potter to letter it because he’d do a great lettering job, big display lettering and stuff. That elevated material a little bit. It was like trying to bodge a thing into submission, really. 2000 AD was still finding its feet, it was still sort of similar to Action minus something in some departments, but going off in other directions. It got up its own head of steam, eventually…’

Back when IPC execs were tossing around ideas for the title of the new comic, Pat Mills vividly remembers the then publisher John Sanders coming up with the futuristic name. “I said to John: ‘What happens when we reach the year 2000? What will we call it then?’” Mills laughs. “He said to me, ‘Don’t worry, Pat. If it lasts three or four years we’ll count ourselves lucky.’”

[comics] Dredding Every Minute of It … profiling Judge Dredd – Arthur Wyatt back at the career of Mega-City One’s greatest Lawman… ‘The far-future setting served Judge Dredd and 2000 AD well over the years, acting as a springboard for all kinds of science fiction-themed stories and building up a menagerie of aliens, mutants, psychics and visitors from other times and dimensions, which all somehow managed to be integrated seamlessly and have a distinctive Judge Dredd spin to them. This magpie tendency even extended across genres: When Dredd wanders beyond the borders of Mega-City One into the vast wasteland of the Cursed Earth, the stories become futuristic Westerns. The genre shifts again to Horror with the introduction of Judge Death, Dredd’s twisted mirror image from another dimension, where life itself has been declared a crime. The one constant is Dredd. Imbued with an unlimited reserve of stoicism and not much given to change himself, Dredd is a perfect foil for the chaotic ever-changing world around him.’

[comics] How we made 2000 AD … Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill on creating 2000AD … Kevin O’Neill: ‘That anti-authoritarian streak is part of the British character: it ran through Dennis the Menace and all the Beano stuff. Judge Dredd was never meant to be serious: the idea of shooting jaywalkers is just very, very funny. I loved the story about the oxygen board on the moon cutting off people’s supply if they didn’t pay their bills. We had to tone things down quite heavily. On the day the first issue went to press, we were whiting out blood and tidying up severed limbs. It was an out-of-control section of the building. NME, who were often in trouble as well, were just a couple of floors above. Our neighbours Buster hated us because we were having fun and swearing. I didn’t think 2000 AD would last a year.’

[comics] 25 Years of Judge Dredd: The Megazine … ‘The Megazine might have been all Dredd and his world all the time to start with, but there was plenty of breakthroughs behind the scenes. The first issue sold more than 50,000 copies, triggering a royalty payment to all the creators featured in it – that had never happened before on a Fleetway title. There was a satirical magazine inside the issue, the Mega-City Times, created via desktop publishing – a first back when titles were still put together with glue and scalpels.’

[comics] Nick Abadzis remembers Brett Ewins who sadly died this week … ‘Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon gave me my start in comics as a creator. I’d worked for Marvel UK and Fleetway before I worked for Deadline, but it was Brett and Steve who looked at my portfolio and saw some potential there and gave me a chance as a cartoonist. Brett found a loose, lanky stick man I’d hidden at the back of all the other drawings and asked if the character had a name. He didn’t, but the two of them read the two-page strip and laughed. I can still hear Brett saying, “Yeah, we’ll have this. Can you give us two or three pages of this every month?” They paid fifty quid a page. Later, the name Hugo Tate attached itself to the character, and Brett and Steve gave me more pages as the strip became more popular.’

[comics] Interviews: learning your A, B, Cs … Pat Mills discusses the A. B. C. Warriors … ‘ I think the ABCs is a rare story that endows machines with personality. This has always seemed an obvious thing to do. To treat them like superheroes but in a more rewarding way. They are a metaphor for working class heroes.’

…one particular title from the late 1980s made headlines earlier this year. Rebellion, the publisher of 2000AD, announced it was planning to reprint Zenith, Morrison’s subversive superhero strip. Shallow, sarcastic and frequently used as a way for Morrison to criticise the Conservative party, the hero’s five-year run in 2000AD ended in 1992. Zenith has been out of print ever since, due to a legal dispute over who owns the rights. So Rebellion’s announcement of a £100 preorder-only hardback complete collection raised rather a lot of eyebrows, with Morrison unable to comment. But, choosing his words carefully, the writer is now able to talk a little about what’s happening.

“Well, it’s very simple,” he begins with a wince. “We, uh, we spent five grand on lawyers’ fees. They sent [Rebellion] letters. We were very keen to discuss it and we’ve never heard back from them. All I can say is that we tried to get into a discussion with them and they just didn’t reply. I don’t know what to do at this stage.”

[comics] MAD MENTAL CRAZY! The True Life of the Fabulous Zenith Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 … a three-part history of the British super-hero Zenith and a look at the murky legal situation regarding ownership of the character … ‘2000 AD maintain that they own the rights while Grant Morrison contends that they do not have the paperwork to prove that. This is not an argument that Morrison had at the time of initial publication, rather one he put forward in later years in greater understanding of the situation, so early interviews with the writer at the time are not entirely illuminating. There are however other pieces of the jigsaw that help build a larger picture. 2000 AD maintain that they have never sought creator owned work and the implication was always that comics were created on a work for hire basis. However, they also operated without contracts in many cases before the early ’90s, and under UK law a creation belongs to the creator until the rights are signed away – regardless of publication or payment.’

[comics] Dave Sim On Creating A Judge Dredd Cover … ‘I originally thought, “Well, Dredd has easily the most complicated costume of any costumed character, so there’s no way I will be able to do that costume accurately in these tiny little spaces.” I was going to do the drawings twice up and have the IDW production department reduce them and place them. “Dave Sim work-made-for-hire cover: some assembly required”. But then it came time and I thought, “Hell, if Brian Bolland can do it, I can do it.” So there I was with a fresh Hunt 102 and my magnifying glass.’

[comics] Respect Due: former 2000AD editor Steve MacManus … ‘Writers like Wagner, Mills, Grant and Alan Moore blossomed. New scribes such as Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan emerged. Great artists like Gibbons, Gibson, Bolland and McMahon did some of their finest work in this period on 2000AD. Amazing new talents like Simon Bisley, Glenn Fabry and Steve Dillon were nurtured in the comic.’

[comics] The Complete D.R. & Quinch … a review of one of Alan Moore’s early works from 2000AD … ‘It’d be hard today to convey the level and nature of the excitement readers felt in 1984 when a fresh new talent — an author — blew into the company town, overhauling a run-of-the-mill commercial comic, revitalizing it completely and, in the process, making it utterly his own. Who was this guy? Where had he learned to write like that?’

[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interview [Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five] … huge interview covering O’Neill’s 40 year career in comics … ‘What Robocop did by beating Judge Dredd to the screen was it stole the best of Judge Dredd, and when they made the Dredd movie, they were then worried about being compared with Robocop! So they took out all the black humor and all the satire, and their emasculated movie was almost a Judge Dredd movie, but not quite. Robocop was a more energetic movie. We did hear there were piles of 2000 ADs in the production offices. That does kind of show, doesn’t it?’ [via Metafilter]

[comics] Grant Goggans On 2000 AD … ‘Andy Diggle famously described 2000 AD, at its best, as delivering you shot glasses of rocket fuel. You may not like every episode of every tale, but all five episodes each week should try and knock you on your backside with excellent characters in fast-moving, over-the-top stories. Nothing else in comics can give you that thrill, and it’s the highwire, anything-goes weekly nature that makes reading 2000 AD so fun.’

[comics] All The Joy I See Through These Architect’s Eyes … comic artist D’Israeli looks at Mega-City One through the art of various artists who have visualised it over the years … On Carlos Ezquerra: ‘Though his Judge Dredd pilot strip was never published, the last page (a full-page view across the city) was used as a back-cover of Prog 3. I remember seeing this aged about eleven and it absolutely blew my mind. The sense of scale, the strangeness of the designs, the feeling of the future as a gritty, exotic place formed by unguessable processes, all of this generated an excitement I’ve rarely felt from comics or any other medium. Along with Italian Massimo Bellardinelli, Ezquerra dragged 2000AD away from the comfortable visual tropes of the 1950’s and, importantly, gave it a signature visual style that distinguished it from the blocky, industrial designs of the recently-released Star Wars. That one page set a visual and imaginative standard for later creators to aspire to; ironically, as a leftover page from a rejected strip, it may be the most important piece of work Ezquerra ever did, and in its influence it may make him one of the most important artists in British comics in the last 30 years.’

[comics] Concordance: 2000 AD … a glossary from the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic … ‘Earthlettes – similar to Earthlets, but applied to females only. This caused a furore on the letters page and eventually was deprecated in favour of the now gender-neutral term “earthlets”, though now “Terrans” seems to be in vogue.’

[comics] US superheroes with Scottish accents… BBC News on Scottish Comics Creators … ‘Along with [Grant] Morrison, the work of some of Scotland’s other great comic book writers and artists has been showcased at an exhibition at the National Library of Scotland. Names such as John Wagner, Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy have dominated the genre in Scotland for decades and have been at the forefront of what Mr Schreck calls “the European invasion” since the late 1970s.’

[comics] Alan Grant’s Edinburgh Lecture — Forbidden Planet Blog reports from a lecture the veteran Judge Dredd / Batman writer gave in Scotland. On Dredd: ‘Alan had been re-reading some of his own early work – something he says normal weekly and monthly comics deadlines don’t leave much time for him to do, he rarely re-reads his own work – in preparation for the talk and is still surprised and a little depressed at how much of what he and Wagner wrote ‘as a laugh’, taking then-current social trends and blowing them up to ridiculous proportions (literally in the case of Two Ton Tony Tubbs), has gone from being satirical humour (something 2000 AD and Dredd in particular has always been good at and something I’ve always relished about it) to being rather too close to the bone (the League of Fatties was hilarious in the early 80s, now he reads about childhood obesity epidemics in Britain and America and suddenly the joke’s not as funny anymore…’

[weird] Dearly departed to heat Manchester crematorium — Mega City One’s Resyk comes one step closer … ‘A Manchester crematorium where “grieving friends and relatives have complained of the cold during services” will tackle the problem by using the “body heat” generated in the incineration process to crank up the temperature…’

[comics] Brendan McCarthy Showreel on Youtube … ‘I recently found this old VHS showreel inside a cobwebbed cardboard box in a storage room. It features art and designs from over a decade ago. Some of what’s there looks a bit dated, as you’d expect, but it’s a fun little romp nonetheless. So I thought I’d post it up for your viewing pleasure…’ [via Barbelith]

[comics] 2000AD still the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic! — Brief Review of Recent 2000AD’s from Chris Weston … ‘It’s a portrait of a man who has led a life devoid of emotion slowly discovering his humanity… a man who is awakening to the fact that his whole life may have been spent in the wrong cause… but has this knowledge come too late? Melancholy and menace hover above this strip like carrion… it really feels like The Tale of Judge Joseph Dredd has entered its final act.’ [via blackbeltjones]

[comics] Massimo Belardinelli 1938 – 2007: A Tribute by Pat Mills — very sad to hear news of the death of this stalwart 2000AD artist from it’s earlier years … ‘It is also worth stressing his real devotion and loyalty to 2000AD. He was not working for 2000AD as a portfolio piece before he headed off to Marvel or Vertigo; in working on the comic he had arrived. It was where he chose to be. I can relate to that. As one 2000AD reader, Steve Earles, put it to me today, he was: “A true one-off. In this day of cookie-cutter clone artists we will not see his like again.” I concur…’

[comics] 2000 AD Prog Slog — a blog covering a rereading of the first 1000 or so issues of 2000AD … On Judge Dredd in Prog 56: ‘You would have thought that if there were such a thing as a robot car with an ethics circuit that there would be a back up to it in case of failure or access to it would be limited to an administrator account that only the manufacturer would have the password to. In the Judge Dredd story that finishes this issue, all Dave Paton has to do to cause this critical function to fail resulting in his car, Elvis, to go on a four prog long killing spree is to pop under the bonnet and accidentally drop a spanner onto the circuit.’ [via Forbidden Planet’s Blog]

[comics] E-Petition:‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to award knighthoods to John Wagner, Pat Mills and Alan Grant, in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the great British comic, 2000AD.’ [via Barbelith]

[comics] 30 years of the future — 2000AD is thirty years old today! Zarjaz, Earthlets! … ‘Judge Dredd is a complex character for liberals to deal with. Comics historian Paul Gravett, co-author of Great British Comics, notes: “He is a huge bully. But there are readers who quite like the idea. We show in my book a picture of a modern day policeman – they look just like Judge Dredd. In many ways we are living in Mega City One.”‘ [via The Coffee Grounds]